A summer of cricket, elections, yelps and thuds

Summering in colours

"Just look at Du Plessis's magic, guys! Rescuing RCB from the jaws of defeat and possible elimination"...

Thundering applause drowns the stadium. Camera catches many flashy smiles whose brightness could very well match the forty above temperature burning up the garden city. But then there are those with their exclamative 'oh nos' hidden away behind cupped hands. Lenses zoom in on them with elegant professional cruelty.

Ah, how liberating it must be to lose oneself in the momentum, the swing of the bat, the spin of the cork, the euphoria of the spectators...find yourself somewhere in the myriad expressions of the sea of strangers...Waves after waves of them.

As a family in the thrall of IPL, India's premier cricket league, we indulge in petty in-house betting and on-the-house iced tea, trying hard to sneak past the sultry summer with its heat and dust. In vain do the eyes search the skies for unwarranted leniency, some faint plume of cloud led astray. Crow pheasants knock constantly against the emptiness of our days. The wall-clock, like an aging geisha trudges grudgingly with no apparent hurry to reach anywhere. 

Someone is listening to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew with headphones on. His eyes are glued to the tv screen, though one can sense that he is not watching it. Outside, the cashew tree sighs. A few more soft thuds unburden the tree of its harvest. 

Mme. is nowhere here. She watches and listens, sees and hears, all through an engulfment of silence. The phone rings. They talk about spinach ravioli in garlic sauce and cheesy beetroot cutlets, and the possibility of having a polarizing government being voted in for the third term in the same breath as the bullying arbitrariness of house-helps. It is her sister. 

The dog next door begins to yelp. He is in dire need of companionship. The owners leave him at home and go off galavanting in Sputnik cafés and strange tropical mansions full of imported liqueurs and unread books. He sits around in the foliaged courtyard riddled in tribulation. 

"Oh, what a brilliant performance by Fraser! Sixer after sixer...You know he is only 22?.." 

The country stands sharply divided at the ballot box, but IPL unites us in our love for cricket. Who invented cricket? The British. 

Et tu, Brute? Traitor, anti-nationalist, unpatriotic beast!

The yelp.

A thud.

Silence.

The phone rings again



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

C'est La Vie...Really?

Seven peacocks sit on the parapet of our terrace fronting the bay. A murder of crows spearing into the morning silence flies past chasing a hungry Brahminy kite who desires absolutely nothing but a clutch of eggs for breakfast.  The jails in the country are packed with sloganeering opposition leaders, journalists, activists, and to use everyone's favorite term, 'pseudo-intellectuals'. As elections draw near, the dire need to quash all competition has arisen  within the alpha party.  More than six months on, the war wages on in  the Holy Land. Yet, the country responsible for it, stands fifth on the World happiness index! According to the United Nations, more than a million people are likely to suffer from starvation in the war-torn region since aid is not being able  to reach the affected populace because of innumerable road blocks.  It rained last night. An out of season shower, which brought the peacocks out of the coconut grove. The cashew tree now laden with fruits, spa
Read more

Beyond dreams and awakenings

How to sift reality from non-reality? Pry dreams from fiction?  Our daily constitutional. In an inadvertent raising of the eyes, rust orange of a crow-pheasant in flight caught and released by the irises...scales of a snake dangling from its beak wring the air silver, merciless.   Further up, on a path crisscrossed by the trembling shadows of coconut trees, an explosion. Anvil hammers away on frail eardrums. Something bounces off the ground, grazes past the right foot: a humongous coconut. Mumsy is unperturbed. "They never fall on people," she reassures me, adding sweetly, "for they have eyes". She points them out to me. I pick up the deadly fruit and shake it: the sound of ambrosial water splashes therein. There is a triumphant smile on mumsy's face, "It is a good one," she exclaims. I am still fazed by this close encounter.  "How many people die from coconut falling on their head" I google. According to a British Travel Insurance Company, c
Read more

Summer Blues

Image
the cashew carrier It is difficult to respond to a long spell of tropical summer with anticipation or with memorable fondness. Clammy, humid, clinging and breathlessly hot, it ushers in an oppressive lusciousness and fructification. Neem, mango, cashew, rose apple, kumquat, all flowering and fruiting trees conspire to blossom, bear, and mature at once. A life of ontogeny and everything it encompasses such as fruit-flies, caterpillars, termite over-rush, and scorpion ants is not something we romanticize; we deal with it. As we do with the incessant two-note song of the koïl, sweet yet monotonous in its execution. Through the endless summers  dappled with our prayers for rains, for respite from heat and dust, peacocks strut down the winding path trumpeting, sounding and beckoning the clouds...I sense their yearnings.  Every few hours I haul myself to the yard to pick up the fallen cashew fruits, soft and swollen with juice. Sometimes only a spatter of overripe fleshiness is found, its fi
Read more